Sensuous strawberries the pick of the crop

Strawberries dipped in warm melted chocolate; strawberries bubbling in chilled champagne; a just-picked sun-heated strawberry popped into your mouth, or any sun-ripened strawberry fed to you by your beloved is sexy, sweet and fragrant as you munch it down.

Disclaimer: you’ll never buy a really sexy strawberry at the supermarket. The perfect strawberry has to ripen on the bush, so it oozes juice when you press it. Any strawberry as soft as that would be all goo and mildew by the time it reached the supermarket. But it is precisely that yielding softness (even better when there is still some warmth from the sun) that’s the difference between a sublime strawberry experience and merely a strawberry-flavoured one.

You may – with luck and dedicated growers – find strawberries with sufficient sensuousness at a farmer’s market. But to have the best strawberries you need to grow your own, preferably in a large pot or ‘strawberry hanger’ on the patio, where you can reach up, sniff that strawberry scent, and slowly and with all due care, taste for as long as possible.

Luckily strawberries are also the easiest fruit in the world to grow. You don’t even need a garden or patio – a doorstep with some sunlight and the space for a tiered strawberry planter (either a fiberglass one or a rustic terracotta one) is fine. For that matter, you can just bung a dozen plants into two Styrofoam boxes from the supermarket with some potting mix – less aesthetically pleasing but highly efficient and cheap.

If all you have is a sunny window, try a hanging basket of strawberries instead. The berries will taste as good.

How many plants?

About a hundred plants should give two adults and two children strawberries for dessert most nights of the week, plus enough to make jam – unless the kids decide to raid the strawberry beds when they come home from school. (I used to make straight for the strawberries as soon as I’d plonked down my school bag when I was a kid. I ate a bowlful or two, then took in some more to freeze for the next day … then I ate the frozen ones from yesterday on the back steps.

A hundred plants don’t mean a strawberry market garden. Scatter the strawberry plants through your flowerbeds. You’ll find a hundred disappear quite quickly.

Otherwise try about 20 plants in their own bed. Even six plants in a hanging basket will give you a few berries every day.

Buy your strawberry plants either bare rooted in bundles, or potted. Dig a hole just wide enough to spread out the roots, so that the soil comes up to the base of the roots. The roots should point down and out, in a wide vase shape. (This won’t make much sense now, but I promise it will when you have a strawberry plant in your hand. ) Each plant should be planted about a hand’s span apart.

Strawberries grow best in full sun, but they will grow in light shade – say under spreading thin-leafed trees, but not in dense shade. Strawberries prefer acid soil – a pine or casuarina needle mulch is excellent but most Australian soils are acid enough anyway – with plenty of humus and moisture.

Keep strawberry plants moist. You'll need to water your strawberries unless it rains twice a week. Drip irrigation is excellent, mulch almost a necessity. If you have the energy, make long hills of compost, about 30-60 centimetres high and plant the berries on that, to maximise sunlight and ensure perfect drainage.

Well-fed strawberries produce more berries. But don’t just give them a high nitrogen fertiliser like sulphate of ammonia, or you’ll get lots of dark green leaves and few berries.

Pick often! Berries ripen quickly and if you don’t pick every day – or at least twice a week – the slugs, millipedes or birds will get them and learn your garden is a berry haven, too.

There are thousands of strawberry varieties. Look for some of the new giant Japanese strawberries if you can. They taste glorious, even if they do look like strawberry sumo wrestlers. Just make sure they are fully red before picking them. ‘Wild’ European strawberries are stunning, as are yellow strawberries, even if they are tiny.

Otherwise ask your local nursery for the variety that does best in local conditions (if they can't tell you or say they're all much of a muchness, patronise another nursery). There are specialist varieties suitable for locations from Hobart to Darwin.

Buy virus-tested runners – next door's spares are probably virus infested, and won't bear well, though they are better than no berries at all – and when ripe, savour that true scented luxury, one of the sweetest in the world.